In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, text and/or multimedia mobile messaging services and data communications. The data services, for example, enable surfing the world wide web, e.g. via a browser. The speeds of the data communications services have steadily increased as service providers have migrated the networks to newer generation technologies with broadband data communication capabilities, and the mobile stations have steadily advanced to take advantage of the new network technologies. The data communication capabilities of the mobile stations and the broadband data communication services offered by the networks enable users to perform more and more tasks from their mobile stations.
Users typically employ a keyboard or a touchscreen on the mobile stations to input data by hunting for and selecting one data character at a time. Because of the limited size of the keypad of many mobile stations, selection of characters using more than one or two fingers can be inefficient. For example, the speed of input of data may limited to the speed at which the user can find a particular character and select the character before repeating the process for the next character. This process may be slowed further by the need to intermittently find, select and activate associate function-change keys (e.g. Shift, Alt, Fn) to change the function of a selected character key before actuation of the character key.
Hence, a need exists for an improved method of inputting data, for example, which provides a mobile station user with an enhanced interface for selecting data characters in rapid succession.